Automated, fast and large-scale computer-aided diagnosis of medical images has become reality. The greatest breakthrough is Deep Learning. It already has huge impact in self-driving cars, industrial product inspection, surveillance, robotics and translation services, and in the medical arena it is outperforming human experts already in many domains.
However, it is still largely a black box. What can we learn from recent insights in the functionality, nanometer-scale connectivity and self-organization of the human visual brain? We will discuss several recent breakthroughs in our understanding of visual perception and visual deep learning.
We apply these techniques in the RetinaCheck project, a large screening / early warning project for eye damage due to diabetes. In China now an alarming 11.6% of the population has developed diabetes, due to genetic factors and fast lifestyle changes. In this project large amounts of retinal fundus images are acquired, and the e-cloud deep learning system successfully learns to identify early biomarkers of retinal disease.
The circle is round: we can prevent blindness by learning from the visual system: vision for vision.

Bart Romeny (1952) is professor in Biomedical Image Analysis (BMIA) at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.
1979 MSc in Applied Physics, Delft University of Technology, NL.
1983 PhD in Physics and Life Sciences, Utrecht University, NL.
1989 Associate prof. Medical Imaging, Utrecht University NL.
2001 Professor Biomedical Image Analysis, Eindhoven University of Technology, NL, emeritus per 21-12-2017.
2013 Professor Biomedical Image Analysis, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China.
His research interests focus on automated computer-aided diagnosis, and quantitative medical image analysis, using brain-inspired computing and brain network modeling. He pioneered the exploitation of multi-scale differential geometry in medical image analysis. His interactive tutorial book is used worldwide. He currently leads the RetinaCheck project, a large screening project for early warning for diabetes and diabetic retinopathy in Liaoning Province. He has developed many sophisticated retinal image analysis applications with his team, in close collaboration with clinical partners and industry.
He (co-)authored over 230 scientific papers, 14418 citations, h-index 42. He is reviewer and/or
associate editor for a range of journals and conferences, and a frequent keynote speaker at
conferences and summer schools.
He was president of the Dutch Society for Clinical Physics, president of the Dutch Society of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering. He is currently president of the Dutch Society for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing, and board member of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).
He is Fellow of the European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering & Science (EAMBES), and senior member of IEEE. He is recipient of the Chinese Liaoning Friendship Award in 2014. He is an enthusiastic and awarded teacher.

Fault tolerant computing is a branch of technology which has developed continuously over decades since the late 1940. Application was limited to areas such as ultra-reliable computers for banks, space flight, aviation, and nuclear power stations. By that time, the extra hardware needed was a real problem that had to be accepted. Overhead often was beyond triplication, whereby extra power was acceptable. Only since about the 1990s, electronic “embedded” sub-system have found their way into new applications such automotive systems and industrial control. Typically, a robust type of electronics was employed which stayed away from smallest feature size technologies and lowest signal voltage swings. More recently, advanced features implemented by automotive electronic systems such as ultra-fast image processing towards autonomous driving strictly demand their implementation in nano-electronic technologies with a minimum feature size of 20 nm and below. Then, suddenly, there are two demands which strongly interact. ICs in nano-technologies show a rising vulnerability to disturbing influences such as particle radiation. Furthermore, the increasing stress due to scaling at constant supply voltage rather than the previous scaling at constant field strength implies a higher level on inherent stress, resulting in wear-out and shorter life times. Hence on-line fault detection and subsequent error correction becomes necessary on a wide scale. But now the extra power needed for fault tolerant computing becomes a nightmare, since extra power and extra heat promotes aging effects strongly. Research has gone two ways. First, methods of fault detection and error correction that get along with only a small extra power budget were developed. Unfortunately, they are not as powerful, robust and universally applicable as, for example, triplication plus majority vote (TMR), which consumes more than triple power. The second approach to the solution is the concept of “error resilience”. It is based on the observation that, depending on function and application of a circuit, a limited number of faults may be acceptable for some time without total system failure. If the overall systems can become aware of its own fault status, acceptance of some faults followed by a process of self-repair by re-organization during a time slot when the system is “at rest” may be a partial solution. Then only those parts of a digital system, where single or multiple bit errors will damage the function directly and critically, will need traditional “fast and hot” methods of error detection and error correction.

Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus received a diploma in electrical engineering from Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) in 1975.
Lecturer for RF technology and electronic circuits with Dar-es-Salaam Technical College in Tanzania (East Africa) from 1975 to 1977.
Dr.-Ing. in EE from University of Siegen in 1983.
Senior researcher with GMD, the German National Research Institute for Information Technology from 1983 to 1996.
Professor for “Technische Informatik” (computer engineering) at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus since 1996.
He has authored or co-authored about 250 papers in the area of computer engineering, mainly related to IC test, technology, dependability and fault correction. He also contributed to three books in the area as an editor and an author. Since 2009, he has initiated and coordinated several projects on advanced education of doctoral students in the area of dependable systems, based on an international network of universities and research institutes.

“Electronic Systems and Interfaces Aiding the Visually Impaired”

Prof. Paweł Strumiłło

Medical Electronics Division

Institute of Electronics

Lodz University of Technology

Poland

Visual impairment is one of the most serious sensory disabilities. It deprives a human being of an active professional and social live. EU reports indicate that for every 1000 Europeans citizens 4 are blind or suffer from serious visual impairment and this number is predicted to increase with time due to our ageing society.
In spite of numerous, worldwide research efforts focusing on building innovative aids helping the blind no single electronic travel aid (ETA) solution has been widely accepted by the blind community. The aim of the tutorial is to apprise the current state of the art in the field of electronic interfaces aiding the blind in independent travel, navigation and access to information. Functional solutions and outcomes of recent research projects devoted to assistive technologies for the visually impaired will be presented.

Paweł Strumiłło received the MSc, PhD and DSc degrees and currently holds the position of full-time university professor at Lodz University of Technology (TUL), Poland. In 1991-1993 he was with the University of Strathclyde (under the EU Copernicus programme) where he defended his PhD thesis. His current research interests include medical electronics, processing of biosignals, soft computing methods and human-system interaction systems. He has published more than 100 frequently cited technical articles, authored one and co-authored two books. He was a principal and co-principal investigator in a number of Polish and European research projects aimed at developing ICT solutions and electronic aids for persons with physical and sensory disabilities. He received a number of prizes and awards for development of assistive technologies for the visually impaired people (in cooperation with Orange Labs). From 2015 he has been the head of the Institute of Electronics at TUL. He is the Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

“Contemporary technologies and techniques for processing of human eye images”

Prof. Adam Dąbrowski

Division of Signal Processing and Electronic Systems

Institute of Automation and Robotics

Faculty of Computing

Center of Mechatronics, Biomechanics, and Nanoengineering

Poznan University of Technology

Poland

Imaging technologies and techniques of the human eye are used for both biometric and medical-diagnostic applications. Among various types of the eye images the following can be distinguished: iris images, fundus images, and various optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans. Contemporary processing approaches to all of these image types are reviewed and analyzed together with a discussion of their applications. Advanced image processing methods and algorithms, including the artificial intelligence approach, developed at the Division of Signal Processing and Electronic Systems of the Poznań University of Technology for the considered applications, are presented. The proposed solutions are characterized by a good effectiveness and accuracy in the support of appropriate biometric and clinical decisions.

Adam Dąbrowski received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from the Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland in 1982. In 1989 he received the Habilitation degree in Telecommunications from the same university. Since 1997 he is a full professor in digital signal processing at the Faculty of Computing, Poznan University of Technology, Poland, and Chief of the Division of Signal Processing and Electronics Systems. He was also professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany, and visiting professor at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. He was a Humboldt Foundation fellow at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany (1984-1986).
His scientific interests concentrate on: digital signal processing (digital filters, signal separation, multidimensional systems, wavelet transformation), processing of images, video and audio, multimedia and intelligent vision systems, biometrics, and on processor architectures. He is author or co-author of 5 books and over 500 scientific and technical publications. Among them he is one of the co-authors of "The Computer Engineering Handbook" (first edition in 2002, second edition in 2008) bestseller and most frequently cited book of the CRC Press, Boca Raton, USA.

Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all and Dept for Medical Physics and Acoustics

Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg

Germany

I will introduce and discuss probabilistic data models and their applications to auditory data and to general pattern recognition tasks. The introduction will reflect the view that powerful data models are able to extract the true compositional nature of data, which allows for a decomposition into their structural primitives.
Probabilistic sparse coding and probabilistic version of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) will be the first concrete models that are introduced and discussed. The state-of-the-art of these models will then be used to point to recent generalization directions. Two of these, translation invariant versions and deep generalizations, will be discussed in more detail. I will work out the benefits and challenges such novel approaches face, and I will discuss their crucial differences compared to supervised deep neural networks.
Finally, I briefly discuss semi-supervised approaches, a field where modern unsupervised and modern supervised Machine Learning algorithms come together, compete and where they are combined.

Jörg Lücke since 2013 is an Associate Professor of Machine Learning in Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all and Dept for Medical Physics and Acoustics, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany and a Guest Professor and Principal Investigator in Dept of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science, Technical University of Berlin, Germany.
In 2008 - 2013 was a Junior Research Group Leader (Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning),
Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and Dept of Physics,
Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
In 2005 - 2007 was a Senior Research Fellow,
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit,
University College London (UCL), UK.
In 2001 - 2005 was a Research Associate in
Institute for Neuroinformatics,
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.

Industrial manufacturing is more and more based groups of robots in production cells. The robots consist of moving, bending and rotating arms with multiple joints. Cables that connect sections of robots undergo heavy stress from stretching and twisting, resulting in wear-out and failure. Replacing cables on robots by wireless communication therefore is an alternative that has been investigated for some time. Unfortunately, communication channels in industrial environments suffer from some adversary effect. First, standard industrial communication networks work on rigid time frames which limit allowed latencies in communication systems considerably. Second, multiple path propagation and destructive interferences make such communication channels sensitive to fading problems. Therefore forward error correction (FEC) that can compensate massive variations of signal strength becomes a must. On the other hand, forward error correction using known methods such as BCH codes, Reed-Solomon codes, turbo codes and low-density parity checks (LDPC) is not very fast by nature. Codes for single effort correction and double error detection (SEC-DED-codes) such as Hamming code and Hsiao code are fast, but they are not powerful enough to correct multiple bit errors or restore missing symbols, unless they are applied in a step-wise approximation.
PENCA (programmable encoding architecture) is a new approach in multiple error detection and correction which is, at present based on BCH codes, reasonably fast by parallel hardware. Furthermore, it allows for adaptive error correction, based on the quality of the channel, therefore providing a better overhead / performance ratio than methods that are based on a fixed number of allowed error bits in a symbol, tailored to handle worst-case conditions.
PENCA is currently becoming part of an industrial communication systems developed in the ParSeC project, which is a cooperative effort of industries, universities and research institutes, funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF).

Petr Pfeifer has received his Ing. (Msc) in Measurement and Instrumentation from Czech Technical University in Prague in 2001. Then, he was employed in global companies like STMicroelectronics or Tyco International in senior R&D and management positions. He received an MSc in economics and management and Senior Executive MBA degree from The Nottingham Trent University. In 2015, he has received his Ph.D. in technical cybernetics, reliability of nanoscale microelectronic devices from Technical university of Liberec. He is employed by Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg) since 2015. He works in research, design and development of advanced industrial systems, and his interest and professional work cover areas from design and manufacturing of digital VLSI ASIC, advanced systems using field programmable gate arrays and complex programmable logic devices, measurement and control, signal processing, communication, industrial, automotive and safety systems, and reliability aspects of dependable systems using modern submicrometer technologies.

Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus received a diploma degree in electrical engineering from Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) in 1975 and a doctorate in EE from the University of Siegen in 1983. From 1983 to 1996 he was a senior researcher with GMD, the German national research institute for information technology. Since 1996 he has been a full professor of computer engineering at Brandenburg University of Technology, since 2013 re-founded as BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg.
He has authored more than 100 papers in the area of test, testable design and fault tolerant computing, and he was the General Chair of the IEEE DDES 2011 symposium in Cottbus. He is also the coordinator of the East-Central European network on “Dependable Cyber Physical Systems”, linking 5 universities in 4 countries.

“Test signals used in electroacoustics and speech technology”

Prof. Andrzej Dobrucki

and

Prof. Stefan Brachmański

Faculty of Electronics

Wroclaw University of Technology

Wroclaw, Poland

The presentation consists of two parts. In the first one, the typical signals applied for testing of electro-acoustical devices are presented. These signals are e.g: harmonic signal, slowly and quickly tuned sinusoid, impulses, Gaussian noise, Maximum Length Sequence, Golay’s Complementary Sequences. The statistical and spectral properties of these signals are described. The methods of analysis of stationary and nonstationary signals are presented as well. In the second part, the signals used for the evaluation of quality of coded and transmitted speech are presented. For this aim, the natural or artificial speech signals are used. The test material can consist of units having semantic meaning as well as of nonsense syllables or words. For the Polish language, the Polish Standard provides a set of logatome lists. American ANSI norms include, among others, rhyme tests. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) guidelines specify the requirements for the test signal base for telecommunications applications. This recommendation presents a set of test signals of various complexity with many typical speech parameters. These signals are intended for both subjective and objective evaluation of the quality of speech transmission.

Andrzej Dobrucki received the M.Sc. degree in 1971 from the faculty of Electronics of Wroclaw University of Technology, and began his scientific career in electroacoustics at the Institute of Telecommunications and Acoustics. In 1977 he received the Ph.D. degree for a dissertation on vibration and sound radiation of conical shells. In 1993 he received the D.Sc. degree. In 2007 he received the title of full professor from hands of President of Poland. His research interests are in the construction and measurement of electroacoustical transducers, the numerical modeling of acoustic fields, vibrations in mechanical structures and digital processing of audio signals. He is consultant for several companies manufacturing electroacoustical transducers.
He published above 200 scientific works: 5 books, 49 papers in journals, 10 chapters in books, and presentations at the international and local scientific conferences. He is also an author of 6 patents. He was the supervisor in 15 PhD. projects. Prof. Dobrucki is the reviewer in many scientific journals, e.g. Physical Review, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Archives of Acoustics, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control.
Andrzej Dobrucki is the co-founder and active member of Polish Section of the Audio Engineering Society (AES). In years 1995-97 and 2003-2007 he held the post of Chairman of the AES Polish Section. In 2007 during the Convention in Vienna, prof. Andrzej Dobrucki was honored with the “Fellowship Award” of the AES. He is also member of the Polish Acoustical Society and he holds the post of President of the Society since 2014.
Andrzej Dobrucki is an experienced academic teacher. He gives the lectures “Physical Acoustics”, “Electroacoustics”, “Electroacoustic Transducers” and “Acoustic Measurements” for the students of Wroclaw University of Technology. For many years he gives the lectures “Modern technologies in hearing aids” for students of the University Paris 12 Val de Marne.

Stefan Brachmański is an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland. Graduated and obtained PhD degree in the Wroclaw University of Technology. His research interests includes speech transmission quality evaluation, speech coding, speech enhancement, forensic acoustics and audio restoration. He is a co-author of Polish Standard: Methods for Measurements of Logatom Intelligibility in Analog Communication Systems. He is the author of Project Polish Standard: Methods for Measurements of Logatom Intelligibility in Digital Communication Systems. He is the author and co-author of 179 papers connected with the speech technology and asessment of speech quality He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, Polish Acoustical Society, Polish Phonetics Association, European Acoustics Association. In the current cadency he is also the Vice-Dean in Faculty of Electronics.

“Image and Video Processing with Tensor Methods”

Prof. Bogusław Cyganek

Department of Electronics

Faculty of Computer Science, Electronics and Telecommunications

AGH University of Science and Technology

Krakow, Poland

Classical methods for processing and analysis of multidimensional signals – such as color videos and hyperspectral images – do not exploit full information contained in inner their factors. On the other hand, recently developed tensor based methods allow for data representation and analysis which directly account for data multidimensionality. Examples can be found in many applications such as face recognition, image synthesis, video analysis, surveillance systems, sensor networks, data stream analysis, marketing and medical data analysis, to name a few.
This talk will be focused on presentation of the basic ideas, as well as recent achievements, in the domain of tensor based signal processing. A systematic overview of tensor data representation, tensor decompositions, as well as pattern recognition with tensors will be presented. Practical aspects and tensor implementation issues will be also discussed.

Bogusław Cyganek received his M.Sc. degree in electronics in 1993, and then M.Sc. in computer science in 1996, from the AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland. He obtained his Ph.D. degree cum laude in 2001 with a thesis on correlation of stereo images, and D.Sc. degree in 2011 with a thesis on methods and algorithms of object recognition in digital images.
During recent years dr. Bogusław Cyganek cooperated with many scientific and industrial partners such as Glasgow University Scotland UK, DLR Germany, and Surrey University UK, as well as Nisus Writer, USA, Compression Techniques, USA, Pandora Int., UK, and The Polished Group, Poland. He is an associated professor at the Department of Electronics of the AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland, as well as a visiting professor to the Wroclaw Technical University. His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition, data mining, as well as development of embedded systems. He is an author or a co-author of over a hundred of conference and journal papers, as well as books with the latest “Object Detection and Recognition in Digital Images: Theory and Practice” published by Wiley in 2013. Dr. Cyganek is a member of the IEEE, IAPR and SPIE.

INVITED SPEAKERS - TUTORIALS GIVEN ON IEEE SPA 2016

“High efficiency video coding”

Prof. Kamisetty Ramamohan Rao

Electrical Engineering Department

The University of Texas at Arlington

Texas, U.S.

In the family of video coding standards, HEVC has the promise and potential to replace/supplement all the existing standards (MPEG and H.26x series including H.264/AVC). While the complexity of the HEVC encoder is several times that of the H.264/AVC, the decoder complexity is within the range of the latter. Researchers are exploring about reducing the HEVC encoder complexity . Kim et al have shown that motion estimation (ME) occupies 77-81% of HEVC encoder implementation. Hence the focus has been in reducing the ME complexity. Several researchers have implemented performance comparison of HEVC with other standards such as H.264/AVC , MPEG-4 Part 2 visual, H.262/PEG-2 Video , H.263, and VP9 and also with image coding standards such as JPEG2000, JPEG-LS, and JPEG-XR. Several tests have shown that HEVC provides improved compression efficiency up to 50% bit rate reduction for the same subjective video quality compared to H.264/AVC . Besides addressing all current applications, HEVC is designed and developed to focus on two key issues: increased video resolution - up to 8kx4k – and increased use of parallel processing architecture. Brief description of the HEVC is provided. However for details and implementation, the reader is referred to the JCT-VC documents , overview papers , keynote speeches , tutorials , panel discussions , poster sessions , special issues , test models (TM/HM) , web/ftp site, open source software , test sequences, anchor bit streams and the latest books on HEVC . Also researchers are exploring transcoding between HEVC and other standards such as MPEG-2 and H.264. Further extensions to HEVC are scalable video coding (SVC), 3D video/multiview video coding and range extensions which include screen content coding (SCC), bit depths larger than 10 bits and color sampling of 4:2:2 and 4:4:4. SCC in general refers to computer generated objects and screen shots from computer applications (both images and videos) and may require lossless coding. Some of these extensions have been finalized by the end of 2014 (time frame for SCC is late 2016). They also provide fertile ground for R & D. Iguchi et al have already developed a hardware encoder for super hi-vision (SHV) i.e., ultra HDTV at 7680x4320 pixel resolution. Also real-time hardware implementation of HEVC encoder for 1080p HD video has been done. NHK is planning SHV experimental broadcasting in 2016. A 249-Mpixel/s HEVC video decoder chip for 4k Ultra-HD applications has already been developed . Bross et al have shown that real time software decoding of 4K (3840x2160) video with HEVC is feasible on current desktop CPUs using four CPU cores. They also state that encoding 4K video in real time on the other hand is a challenge. Multimedia research group (MRC) predicts 2 billion HEVC based devices by end of 2016.

Kamisetty Ramamohan Rao is a full professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (UT Arlington). He is credited with the co-invention of discrete cosine transform (DCT), along with N. Ahmed and T. Natarajan due to their benchmark publication, “N. Ahmed, T. Natarajan, and K. R. Rao, "Discrete Cosine Transform", IEEE Trans. Computers, 90-93, Jan 1974.”
Dr. Rao received B.S. E.E from the College of Engineering, Guindy, affiliated to The University of Madras, India in 1952. In 1959, he received his M.S.E.E degree from University of Florida followed by an M.S.NuE from the University of Florida in 1960. He received the Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico in 1966.
In 2011, Dr Rao reached an academic milestone, supervising his 100th Graduate Student.
K. R. Rao received the Ph. D. degree in electrical engineering from The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1966. He is now working as a professor of electrical engineering in the University of Texas at Arlington, Texas. He has published (coauthored) 16 books, some of which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. Also as ebooks and paper back (Asian) editions. He has supervised 87 Masters and 31 doctoral students. He has published extensively and conducted tutorials/workshops worldwide. He has been a consultant to academia, industry and research institutes.

“Computational models for predicting sound quality”

Prof. Brian C.J. Moore

Department of Experimental Psychology

University of Cambridge

Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EB, England

The quality of an audio device, such as a microphone, amplifier, or headphone, depends on how accurately the device transmits the properties of the sound source to the ear(s) of the listener. Two types of “distortion” can occur in this transmission: (1) “Linear” distortion, which may be described as a deviation of the frequency response from the “target” response; (2) Nonlinear distortion, which is characterised by frequency components in the output of the device that were not present in the input. These two forms of distortion have different perceptual effects. Their effects on sound quality can be predicted using a model of auditory processing with the following stages: (1) A filter to take into account the transmission of sound from the device to the ear of the listener; (2) A filter to simulate the effects of transmission through the middle ear; (3) An array of bandpass filters to simulate the auditory filters that exist in the cochlea of the inner ear. For predicting the perceptual effects of linear distortion, a model operating in the frequency domain can be used. For predicting the perceptual effects of nonlinear distortion, a model operating in the time domain is required, since the detailed waveforms at the outputs of the auditory filters need to be considered. The models described have been shown to give accurate predictions for a wide range of “artificial” and “real” linear and nonlinear distortions.

Brian Moore is Emeritus Professor of Auditory Perception in the University of Cambridge. His research interests are: the perception of sound in normal and impaired hearing; design of signal processing hearing aids for sensorineural hearing loss; methods for fitting hearing aids to the individual; perception of music and of musical instruments. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Acoustical Society of America, The Audio Engineering Society, and the Association for Psychological Science, and an Honorary Fellow of the Belgian Society of Audiology and the British Society of Hearing Aid Audiologists. He is President of the Association of Independent Hearing Healthcare Professionals (UK). He has written or edited 20 books and over 640 scientific papers and book chapters. He has been awarded the Littler Prize and the Littler Lecture of the British Society of Audiology, the Silver and Gold medals of the Acoustical Society of America, the first International Award in Hearing from the American Academy of Audiology, the Award of Merit from the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, the Hugh Knowles Prize for Distinguished Achievement from Northwestern University and an honorary doctorate from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. He is wine steward of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

“The crucial role of mathematics in circuits, systems and signal processing research and education”

Prof. Joos Vandewalle

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Electrical Engineering Department - ESAT, Stadius Division

Leuven, Flanders, Belgium

Over the recent years the role of mathematics in innovations for Circuits, Systems and Signal processing has increased considerably. The talk will overview the dynamical forces and their impact on the research and education. Examples will be given of mathematical methodologies for signal and image classification, data fusion, biomedical diagnostics with support vector machines, matrix and tensor decompositions. Also cryptographic algorithms are crucial in our modern society. Important lessons can be learned for research planning, dissemination and reproducibility as well as for teaching in engineering.

Joos Vandewalle obtained the electrical engineering degree and doctorate in applied sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium in 1971 and 1976. Until October 2013 he was a full professor at the Department Electrical Engineering (ESAT), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; head of the SCD division at ESAT, with more than 150 researchers. Since October 2013 he is a professor emeritus with assignments at KU Leuven. His present tasks include chairing the positioning test for engineering in Flanders, board member of the Flemish Academy in Brussels, chairing PhD defenses, …
He held visiting positions University of California, Berkeley and I3S CNRS Sophia Antipolis, France.
He taught courses in linear algebra, linear and nonlinear system and circuit theory, signal processing and neural networks. His research interests are in mathematical system theory and its applications in circuit theory, control, signal processing, cryptography and neural networks. He (co-)authored more than 300 international journal papers and obtained several best paper awards and research awards and in 2016 the IEEE CAS Desoer Technical Achievement Award. His publications received over 30 000 googlescholar citations. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IET, and EURASIP and member of the Academia Europaea and of the Belgian Academy of Sciences. From 2009 till 2013 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He is a member of the Fetzer Advisory Council on Engineering and Chair of the IEEE CAS Circuits and Systems Education and Outreach TC, and Chairman of the class of Technical sciences of the Belgian Academy KVAB.
http://www.ae-info.org/ae/User/Vandewalle_Joseph

INVITED SPEAKERS - TUTORIALS GIVEN ON IEEE SPA 2015

“Error Resilience in Nano-Electronic Digital Circuits and Systems”

Christian Gleichner, Prof. Heinrich T. Vierhaus

BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany

For more than 10 years, many authors have predicted dependability problems with large-scale integrated circuits, implemented in nano-technologies. Reasons are new and enhanced fault mechanisms that affect either a higher vulnerability against transient faults, caused by particle radiation, or pre-mature aging due to device degradation. More recently, power dissipation on ICs has become a major problem, also affecting reliability aspects, since most fault mechanisms are strongly enhanced by higher temperatures. The final challenge is to handle a variety of fault effects at minimum cost in extra hardware in order to enhance dependability and system life time.

The tutorial first gives an introduction into the basic problems. Next methods for the detection and correction of short transient faults are shown. Then methods that can detect and correct delay faults are presented, followed by new architectures that may handle transient faults and delay faults in combination. Built-in self repair (BISR) is presented as a method that is not capable of on-line error correction, but may be helpful for life-time extension. Finally there is a comparison of such technologies in terms of requirements for extra time or extra power.

Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus received a diploma degree in electrical engineering from Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) in 1975 and a doctorate in EE from the University of Siegen in 1983. From 1983 to 1996 he was a senior researcher with GMD, the German national research institute for information technology. Since 1996 he has been a full professor of computer engineering at Brandenburg University of Technology, since 2013 re-founded as BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg.

He has authored more than 100 papers in the area of test, testable design and fault tolerant computing, and he was the General Chair of the IEEE DDES 2011 symposium in Cottbus. He is also the coordinator of the East-Central European network on “Dependable Cyber Physical Systems”, linking 5 universities in 4 countries.

Christian Gleichner received a Diploma in Computer Science from BTU Cottbus in 2009. Then he worked as a junior researcher at BTU Cottbus in industrial projects with a focus on test technology for embedded processors in automotive applications. He received his doctorate (Dr.-Ing.) in computer engineering in 2014. Since then he has been a senior researcher at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg with a research focus on test technology, specifically for systems in the field of application.

“Cross-domain applications of multimodal human-computer interfaces”

Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski

Gdansk University of Technology

ETI Faculty, Multimedia System Department

Gdansk, Poland

Developed multimodal interfaces for education applications and for disabled people are presented, including interactive electronic whiteboard based on video image analysis, application for controlling computers with mouth gestures and audio interface for speech stretching for hearing impaired and stuttering people and intelligent pen allowing for diagnosing and ameliorating developmental dyslexia. The eye-gaze tracking system named “CyberEye” is presented including the method of analysis of visual activity of patients remaining in vegetative state helping to assessment of their awareness. The scent emitting multimodal computer interface is also discussed. A new approach to diagnosing Parkinson’s disease is shown which is used to evaluate motor and behavioral symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease. The paper is concluded with some more topics & demonstrations of technologies developed for applications to intelligent surveillance systems, environment monitoring systems and automated solutions for enhancement of degraded audio recordings.

Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski is a native of Gdansk, Poland. He received his M.Sc. degree in Sound Engineering from the Gdansk University of Technology, Poland in 1982, his Ph.D. degree in 1987 and his D.Sc. degree in 1992 from the Cracow Academy of Mining and Metallurgy in Poland. He joined the staff of the Sound Engineering Department of the Gdansk University of Technology in 1984. In December 1999 Mr. President of Poland granted him the title of Professor. In 2002 the Senate of his University approved him to the position of Full Professor. He is an author of more than 500 research papers published in international journals or presented in congresses & conferences around the World. He is also author of 10 Polish patents in the domain of computer science and 6 international patents. Prof. Czyżewski serves as Head of the Multimedia Systems Department of Gdansk University of Technology; He holds Fellowship of the Audio Engineering Society and he is a member of: IEEE, International Rough Set Society, and others. He acted as a leader of more than 30 domestic research grant projects and 7 international projects. He together with his research team won around 40 domestic and international prizes and medals for their achievements in engineering science, including the First Prize of the Polish Prime Minister received twice (in 2000 and 2015).

“Thermal camera cores - present and future”

MSc Harald Dingemans

Managing Director of Linc Polska

Poznan, Poland

and

MSc Jakub Sobek

Certified MOBOTIX and FLIR Trainer Linc Polska

Poznan, Poland

The military has used infrared thermal imaging cameras for many years as a way to see better on the battlefield at night and through smoke. The cores of the thermal cameras have been coming down in prices over the past few years. Now this technology can be used in a wide variety of applications. Thermal camera's cores are designed for easy and efficient integration into higher level assemblies and platforms. This tutorial is made to show present possibilities of fascinating thermal imaging and what is the future of this technology.

Harald Dingemans is an absolvent of the Hogeschool van Utrecht. He is a specialist in technical security, especially in Visual Surveilance Systems. He is a visionary and has a longstanding practice. He also takes part in an international ventures. There is nothing that is impossible for him to achieve and he can easily put the theory into practice. Above all, Mr. Dingemans often helps young people to realize their ideas and achieve their goals. Currently, he is the Managing Director of Linc Polska and the Chairman of the board of Smart-i. He actively co-operates with Polish Chamber of Security (PIO), Polish Engineers and Technicians Association of Technical Security and Security Management “POLALARM” and Polish Chamber of Alarm Systems (PISA). Pragmatism and innovation - those are the words that best describe the personality of Mr. Dingemans.

Jakub Sobek is an absolvent of Poznan University of at Faculty of Computing Science. His master thesis was written at Division of Signal Processing and Electronic Systems and it was about implementation of SWIFT algorithm for fingerprint recognition. After studies he has started to work for company Linc Polska as a technical trainer. At 2012 he passed the examination process organized by the MOBOTIX company and from that moment he is the first and the only one Certified MOBOTIX Trainer in Poland. MOBOTIX is a producer of high resolution megapixel IP cameras. Jakub Sobek is also Certified Trainer for FLIR Security Products.

INVITED SPEAKERS - TUTORIALS GIVEN ON IEEE SPA 2014

“Signal Processing for Big Data”

Prof. Georgios B. Giannakis

University of Minnesota

USA

We live in an era of data deluge. Pervasive sensors collect massive amounts of information on every bit of our lives, churning out enormous streams of raw data in various formats. Mining information from unprecedented volumes of data promises to limit the spread of epidemics and diseases, identify trends in financial markets, learn the dynamics of emergent social-computational systems, and also protect critical infrastructure including the smart grid and the Internet’s backbone network. While Big Data can be definitely perceived as a big blessing, big challenges also arise with large-scale datasets. The sheer volume of data makes it often impossible to run analytics using a central processor and storage, and distributed processing with parallelized multi-processors is preferred while the data themselves are stored in the cloud. As many sources continuously generate data in real time, analytics must often be performed “on-the-fly” and without an opportunity to revisit past entries. Due to their disparate origins, massive datasets are noisy, incomplete, prone to outliers, and vulnerable to cyber-attacks. These effects are amplified if the acquisition and transportation cost per datum is driven to a minimum. Overall, Big Data present challenges in which resources such as time, space, and energy, are intertwined in complex ways with data resources. Given these challenges, ample signal processing opportunities arise. This tutorial lecture outlines ongoing research in novel models applicable to a wide range of Big Data analytics problems, as well as algorithms to handle the practical challenges, while revealing fundamental limits and insights on the mathematical trade-offs involved.

Georgios B. Giannakis (Fellow’97) received his Diploma in Electrical Engr. from the Ntl. Tech. Univ. of Athens, Greece, 1981. From 1982 to 1986 he was with the Univ. of Southern California (USC), where he received his MSc. in Electrical Engineering, 1983, MSc. in Mathematics, 1986, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engr., 1986. Since 1999 he has been a professor with the Univ. of Minnesota, where he now holds an ADC Chair in Wireless Telecommunications in the ECE Department, and serves as director of the Digital Technology Center. His general interests span the areas of communications, networking and statistical signal processing – subjects on which he has published more than 365 journal papers, 615 conference papers, 20 book chapters, two edited books and two research monographs (h-index 108). Current research focuses on sparsity and big data analytics, wireless cognitive radios, mobile ad hoc networks, renewable energy, power grid, gene-regulatory, and social networks. He is the (co-) inventor of 22 patents issued, and the (co-) recipient of 8 best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) and Communications Societies, including the G. Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. He also received Technical Achievement Awards from the SP Society (2000), from EURASIP (2005), a Young Faculty Teaching Award, and the G. W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research from the University of Minnesota. He is a Fellow of EURASIP, and has served the IEEE in a number of posts, including that of a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE-SP Society.

Ultra-high speed wireless communication will enable next generation internet access with an unbelievable comfort and service. According to predictions the requirement for speed will increase according to the ITRS roadmap of NVM storage. This leads to wireless multi-gigabit access already in the next years for short range networks and to cellular systems in the next 5-10 years.
The talk will highlight the challenges in developing ultra-high speed wireless systems of 100Gb/s and beyond. The different sub-systems will be shortly analyzed like antennas, RF-frontend, baseband-processor and MAC-processor. The German research community has launched a special priority program to investigate different wireless 100 Gb/s approaches. Thus, the talk will briefly address the different individual project approaches. Special focus will be the discussion of a potential paradigm shift towards more analog signal processing. This might be interesting since it promises a reduction in circuit complexity and power consumption.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rolf Kraemer received his diploma and Ph.D. from RWTH Aachen in electrical engineering 1979 and 1985. The topic of his thesis was on “Portability Aspects of System Software”. He joined the Philips Research Laboratories in 1985 where he worked on distributed systems, communication systems, wireless high speed communication, and embedded control- and management-software in different positions and responsibilities until 1998 in Hamburg and Aachen. In 1998 he became a Professor at Technical University of Cottbus with the joined appointment of the department head of wireless systems at the IHP in Frankfurt (Oder). His research interests are in the area of ultra-high speed wireless system as well as ultra-low power wireless communications. To this end he also explores different design methods like GALS etc. He is also still very much interested in distributed software design and protocol structures. His teaching obligations address the area of distributed operating systems, mobile communication, and sensor networks. In the IHP he leads a research department with more than 50 researchers in topics of high speed wireless communication systems, sensor networks and middleware systems, as well as dependable systems. In 2012 he was granted the DFG priority program “Wireless 100Gb/s and beyond” and he has been nominated as speaker of this program. Prof. Kraemer is founder of 2 start-up companies and works as business angel since 2009.

“New Ways of Doctoral Education in the Age of Cyber Physical Systems”

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus

Computer Eng., BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany

Technical education has to meet new challenges with the arrival of large-scale cyber physical systems. Since such systems are real-time critical, distributed, often safety-critical, and heterogeneous by nature, their design and their control in everyday use creates challenges which must be mastered by qualified engineers. On the other hand, existing schemes of technical education by far follow traditional patterns of analog and digital hardware designers with at least some notion of timing on one side, and software designers, deeply embedded in their cyber space with little relation to real time challenges, on the other hand. This paper shows some recent efforts in international higher education with a strong devotion to close existing gaps.

Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus:
Diploma in Electrical Engineering from Ruhr-Universität Bochum 1975
Lecturer for electronics and microwave engineering at Dar-es-Salaam Technical College (1975-1977)
Research assistant at University of Siegen (1978-1983)
Doctorate (Dr.-Ing.) in EE from University of Siegen in 1983
Senior researcher at “German National Research Institute for Information Technology” (GMD) (1983-1996)
Since 1996 full Professor for Computer Engineering at Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU Cottbus)
Special interest: Innovative concepts of education for doctoral students with international partners, preferably next door (Poznan, Liberec, Tallinn).

Many classes of data are composed as purely additive combinations of latent parts that do not result in subtraction or diminishment of the parts. Compositional models such as non-negative matrix factorization can effectively learn these latent structures of the data. Even though such models most naturally applies to non-signal data such as counts of populations, they can be employed to explain other forms of data as well. On signal processing, these models can be used to give more interpretable representations than what is obtained with many established signal processing methods. Therefore, during the last few years such models have provided new paradigms to solve old standing signal processing problems, e.g. source separation and robust pattern recognition. For example in the field of audio processing where we often deal with mixtures of sounds, the models have been used as parts of processing systems to advance the state of the art on many problems, for example on the analysis of polyphonic music and recognition of noisy speech. In this presentation we show how compositional models can be powerful tools for signal processing, providing highly interpretable representations, and enabling diverse applications such as signal analysis, recognition, manipulation, and enhancement. We will use several examples from the field of audio processing to demonstrate the effectiveness of the models.

Tuomas Virtanen is an Academy Research Fellow and an adjunct professor at Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology (TUT), Finland. He received the M.Sc. and Doctor of Science degrees in information technology from TUT in 2001 and 2006, respectively. He has also been working as a research associate at Cambridge University Engineering Department, UK. He is known for his pioneering work on single-channel sound source separation using non-negative matrix factorization based techniques, and their application to noise-robust speech recognition, music content analysis and audio event detection. In addition to the above topics, his research interests include content analysis of audio signals in general and machine learning. He has authored more than 100 scientific publications on the above topics. He has received the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2012 best paper award for his article "Monaural Sound Source Separation by Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Temporal Continuity and Sparseness Criteria" as well as two other best paper awards.

Kamisetty Ramamohan Rao received the Ph. D. degree in electrical engineering from The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1966. He is now working as a professor of electrical engineering in the University of Texas at Arlington, Texas. He has published (coauthored) 16 books, some of which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. Also as ebooks and paper back (Asian) editions. He has supervised 87 Masters and 31 doctoral students. He has published extensively and conducted tutorials/workshops worldwide. He has been a consultant to academia, industry and research institutes.

“Visually impaired mobility and ICT supports”

Edwige E. Pissaloux

ISIR/Paris-Sorbonne & CNRS/UMR 7222, France

This talk will propose a computational approach to the concept of mobility and will discuss its existing and possible ICT implementations.
Based on different psycho-cognitive human spaces introduced by B. Tversky (Stanford 2004) the mobility is considered as an interaction task, between these spaces and human beings, which has emerged during human evolution and adaptation to the environment. Therefore, different elementary functions, subtending the mobility and proper to different spaces, are identified; these functions, which should be evolvable and suitable for constant human-environment co-evolution, could be integrated in new ICT holistic technological mobility assistance. A state-of-art of some of existing and on-going academic ICT projects, which target the appropriate support of the mobility concept will be provided.

Edwige Pissaloux is a full professor and researcher at the ISIR (Institute of Inteligent Systems and Robotics) at Paris-Sorbonne University (University Paris 6 or UPMC). She works on modelling and design of vision and visual perception (cognitive) systems, and assistive devices. Recently (2010-2012), she participated in the “AsTeRICS” EU FP7 project (design of a visible spectrum intelligent gaze tracker for upper limb motor impaired people). Prof. Pissaloux is a member of several international advisory boards of universities and research institutes, and teaches in several universities (Australia, Hong-Kong, Canada). Prof. Pissaloux acts as expert for many international institutions such as European Commission, ARC/Australia, HKGRC/China, CRSNI/Canada, etc. In her free time, as violinist and violin professor, she teaches violin for visually impaired children.

“Combining Fault Tolerance and Self Repair in a Virtual TMR Scheme”

Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus

Computer Eng., BTU Cottbus, Germany

With decreasing minimum feature size, nano-electronic circuits and systems exhibit an increasing variety of defect and fault mechanisms. Their rising sensitivity to radiation- and coupling induced single and multiple event upsets is one problem, new or enhanced aging processes that may lead to early-lifetime failures pose another threat. The compensation of transient fault effects is a well explored are of science, while repair technologies that tackle permanent faults have so far found a broad acceptance only for embedded memories and for FPGA-based systems. However, specifically such methods and architectures are of great practical importance for the compensation of early-lifetime failures. The combination of fast error compensation and repair mechanisms is even more challenging, since also aspects of minimum power consumption become important in many areas of application.

Heinrich Theodor Vierhaus:
Diploma in Electrical Engineering from Ruhr-Universität Bochum 1975
Lecturer for electronics and microwave engineering at Dar-es-Salaam Technical College (1975-1977)
Research assistant at University of Siegen (1978-1983)
Doctorate (Dr.-Ing.) in EE from University of Siegen in 1983
Senior researcher at “German National Research Institute for Information Technology” (GMD) (1983-1996)
Since 1996 full Professor for Computer Engineering at Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU Cottbus)
Special interest: Innovative concepts of education for doctoral students with international partners, preferably next door (Poznan, Liberec, Tallinn).